Wix has come to be pretty widely recognized over the previous couple of years, in part due to budget-busting advertising and marketing campaigns starring stars like heidi klum, jason statham and gal gadot, better known as marvel woman. But let’s begin with the basics. Nowadays, wix is the largest participant inside the website building landscape and hosts a whopping a hundred and sixty million websites.

Wix Review: Summary

Wix offers an remarkable drag-and-drop web site builder to create small websites. There are 100s of free templates to be had. Wix presents its own web hosting as well as domains (loose and paid). The app market makes it easy to add extra functionality which includes picture galleries or ecommerce.

Who Should Use Wix?

Their visually awesome layouts are designed for small groups, restaurants, on-line shops and artists including musicians and photographers. They may be optimized for cellular devices and may be spiced up with one of the severa apps available from the wix app market.

In a manner you may examine wix to a prefabricated residence: the essential shape already exists and can’t be modified. You could, however, paint the walls on your gusto (pick a theme) and upload the furniture you adore (photograph galleries and other apps). In truth, i used it to create our very own bilingual employer internet site known as tooltester. Net. We had a particular design in mind and simply wanted a short manner to build it. Also, i didn’t need to ought to think about security updates and so forth. Which intended wordpress wasn’t an alternative.

In the end i taken into consideration both weebly and wix (our top-rated developers) and went for wix. With weebly there has been just no ideal manner to make our layout appearance properly on mobile devices. Working with the wix editor became a breeze, imparting accessible tools along with photograph filters and animated texts. However before on the brink of swipe your credit card, take into account that every website has one of a kind requirements.

Wix’s Pricing Options

Wix is available free of charge for as long as you want. In case you want expert capabilities like your own area name or ecommerce, you ought to pick from one in all their top rate plans ranging from “blend” to “commercial enterprise vip”. The cheapest advert-unfastened plan with a custom domain call fees $thirteen per month.

Wix Pricing

Pros and Cons of Wix

Pros

• The most remarkable thing about Wix is its templates. The designs are exceptional and offer pre-built layouts for many different industries.
• It’s extremely flexible. Whereas other website builder limit the extent to which elements can be moved around, Wix allows your to finish your work off “pixel perfect”.
• Adding animations. Wix is one of the few site builders that let you animate text and other elements. But make sure not to overdo it!
• App Market. There are hundreds of website apps that you can add to your website. There is a newsletter tool, live chat software, online booking widgets, etc. All of those can be easily integrated into your Wix website. But keep in mind: many of them are third party apps—if they get shut down you can’t complain to Wix.
• Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI). Wix offers a (relatively) smart assistant to create your website with. But this is only available for some types of projects (e.g. portfolios, yoga sites, etc). For instance, it’ll automatically connect your social media, generate a contact form for you or pick a suitable design for your audience. But don’t worry, if you don’t like something, you’ll be able to change it.
• Automatic Site Backup. Wix automatically creates backup points of your website that can be restored at any time. This way you will never lose any important information.

Cons

• Pricing. The cheapest ad-free plan with Wix is called Combo, which starts at $13 per month (compare Wix’s premium plans.) The competition offers cheaper options: Weebly’s cheapest plan without any advertising starts at around $8, for example.
• Templates can’t be changed easily. Once you have chosen your initial template, you can’t switch to a completely new one. You can certainly change the design within the template, it’s not possible to pick an entirely new one.
• Loading speed – Wix’s page loading speeds are not ideal as our research shows, especially on mobile devices. Although Wix seems to be aware of this issue, most competing website builders show faster loading times.

Rating Details

Features             

Your own domain name (e.g. .com or .net) – Yes

Free domain name for one year included in the premium “Combo” and higher plans. Wix supports domain endings including: .com, .org, .net, .co.uk and .info. Renewal prices start at $14.95 per year. Using the “Connect Domain” package (and higher) it is possible to move your existing domain to Wix or point it from another domain registrar to Wix. More information. Always included: SSL encryption (https).

Depth of navigation   

A maximum of two levels is possible. A third level would be desirable as right now it’s not very convenient to manage a larger site with Wix (30+ pages). Also, the more pages you add, the slower the editor tends to load.

Widgets (small tools to add extra functionality)  

Wix App Market features a wide range of unique widgets and apps. We especially like Wix Music, to sell and promote music, and Wix Bookings that will let your customers book and pay for appointments and consultations. External applications can be integrated as well.

Monetization – Yes

You can integrate Google AdSense via their App store. Another possibility is banner ads and affiliate links.

E-Commerce

An online store is included in the “Business & eCommerce” packages. You can also test the function in the other plans. At $23 per month it’s fairly priced (there are no sales fees) and it allows to sell both physical and digital goods while tracking what you have in stock. Learn more in our detailed Wix Ecommerce review.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)      

You may have heard bad things about Wix’s SEO capabilities, which was still true a few years ago (more about this here). However, they have improved massively, letting you edit page titles, meta descriptions, and alt tags individually. There are even advanced SEO tools like 301 redirects. Unfortunately, Wix changes image file names into something cryptic (e.g. 09ab7~mv2.jpg/), which is a minor disadvantage. Beginners can use the SEO Wiz, a guided tutorial. For more information, check Wix’s SEO post.

Blog      

Wix’s blog is a pretty good add-on, which is also SEO-friendly. It comes with most of the features that you’ll need (e.g. tags, categories, RSS, etc.). It’s also possible to schedule blog posts. With the Wix mobile app you can edit and publish articles on the go. A downside is the cumbersome commenting feature. Your visitors need to sign up for an account with your website to leave a comment.

Visitor statistics

In order to access statistics, Google Analytics must be integrated in advance.

Contact form – Yes

There is a simple contact form builder, which is limited to 10 form fields. More sophisticated tools can be found in the App Market.

Password-protected areas – Yes

Exemplary! Pages can be allocated an individual password. You can even create a small membership website where users sign up in order to receive personal login credentials. Unfortunately it doesn’t integrate with ecommerce. You decide whether they get approved instantly or manually by you. Both features included in all plans.

Newsletter tool – Yes

You can use Wix’s own “ShoutOut” newsletter service. It’s very easy to use but not as powerful as specialized external providers. Read our full Wix ShoutOut review here.

Add HTML code – Yes

Embed various widgets and other tools by means of an integrated app called HTML iframe. But that’s not all: Wix Code (Corvid) caters to people with advanced coding skills and lets you set up custom API interactions by means of JavaScript. You can also create databases.

Storage space – 500 MB+

500 MB – 20 GB web space, depending on the pricing tier. Please note that there is also a monthly bandwidth limit in most plans. This is only relevant for large websites, e.g. the 2 GB bandwidth of the Combo plan should be enough for about 3,000-5,000 visitors per month). The Unlimited and VIP plans both provide unlimited bandwidth.

Backups & Restore – Yes

Wix comes with a very convenient version control system, called Site History, that will let you restore to any previous version of your site with one click.

Fun Factor     

Starting up is very playful and, initially, impressive results are achieved quickly. Wix gives you a lot of freedom in the design process.

Overall Rating – 4.6/5

Wix.com is a smart website builder with optical delights. Easy to use and as flexible as it can get. It’s the perfect website builder for photographers, bands, artists and any kind of (small) portfolio site. Loading speeds should be improved.

Wix Review: Conclusion

Wix recommendation

If I am being honest I had my reservations about Wix at first as their product hasn’t always been easy to recommend. Back in the days it was Flash-based and always a bit different (like your old classmate who had that weird taste in clothes). However, thanks to their neverending improvements they have become one of the cool kids, slowly climbing our ranking to now claim the top position.

Wix and SEO: can we be friends?

wix seoThey even got Google’s John Mueller to publicly state that Wix’s SEO capabilities are fine for their search engine. So unless you are planning on ranking for some insanely competitive keyword you should have no issues with Wix! In the end, SEO depends a lot more on your ability to create outstanding content rather than the website builder. Wix has one SEO disadvantage, though, due to its relatively slow loading speeds on mobile devices.

Wix’s App Market: all the widgets you will ever need?

One area where they’ve really done everything right is their app store. Most other website builders mainly rely on third-party apps that can break if the company stops supporting them. Wix’s strategy is a bit different: they have created more than 80 high-quality apps themselves. Among those: an appointment scheduling tool (Wix Bookings), the event management app Wix Events, hospitality widgets (Wix Restaurants and Wix Hotels) as well as Photo Gallery and Video tools. And you can bet that there will be more.

Final Conclusion

Wix has the widest selection of prebuilt designs for any kind of industry. As it’s not possible to switch to a new theme after your initial choice, it’s more difficult to revamp your site’s design (you’ll have to redesign it manually or start from scratch). On the positive side, this limitation facilitates Wix’s greatest strength: unmatched flexibility within your chosen theme.

And even if sometime down the road you would like to get into the ecommerce game you can easily add a shopping cart at relatively little cost. Read our Wix Ecommerce review to learn more.

What Wix has created here is certainly impressive in many ways with a development speed that is almost breathtaking. Just make sure you try out the free plan before switching to a paid plan to find out if it’s the right choice for you.